Tech Guru Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint: How to Age Slower than the Average 10-Year-Old 

Key Points: 

• Johnson routinely takes measurements of nearly all his organs to assess how fast he is aging, which is now at the rate of a 10-year-old (0.69 years per year). 
• He uses these measurements to make decisions about his lifestyle, including what he eats and which pills he takes. 
• His dietary routine encompasses caloric restriction — eating fewer calories, a plant-based diet, and many supplements, including nicotinamide riboside (NR), which he is soon replacing with nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN).

Bryan Johnson takes age reversal very seriously. In 2013, he sold his company Braintree, an electronic payment platform, for $800 million. Despite this financial success, he realized he needed to make some drastic changes. 

Johnson currently runs Kernel, a neurotech company that produces brain-signal-measuring helmets, and OS Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in emerging science and technology. He is also perhaps the most committed individual on Earth when it comes to extending lifespan. This is no secret, as his full age-optimizing routine is outlined on his website Blueprint and summarized here.

Measuring the Body 

“This time, our time, right now — the early 21^st century — will be defined by the radical evolution of intelligence: human, AI and biology. Our opportunity is to be this exciting future.” – Bryan Johnson  

While the Blueprint website includes Bryan Johnson’s routine, it also reveals Johnson’s philosophy and mindset. It’s about optimizing and pushing forward human progress, which begins at the level of the individual. Individual progress begins with saving time and energy through self-automation — what Johnson calls the Autonomous Self. We now have the technology to free ourselves from time- and energy-consuming decisions concerning diet, exercise, and sleep. We have the gift of measurement. We can use biological measurements to make our decisions for us. 

Johnson routinely takes hundreds of biological measurements spanning 70 organs. He not only checks if his values are clinically optimal but also compares them to younger individuals. Here are examples of some of his optimal measurements and their age equivalencies:  

• Fasting blood glucose of a 28-year-old
• Body fat percentage of a 16-year-old (6.9%)
• Grip strength and testosterone of a 33-year-old
• Inflammation levels (hsCRP) of a 10-year-old 
• NAD+ levels of a 28-year-old
• Respiratory fitness (VO₂ max) of an 18-year-old

Johnson also measures his biological (epigenetic) age, which can be higher or lower than chronological age. According to his biological age, he ages at the same rate as a 10-year-old (0.69 years per year), which is slower than 88% of 18-year-olds, and 94% of 45-year-olds. Furthermore, he set a world record by reducing his biological age by 5.1 years in seven months. 

Johnson is able to make himself biologically younger by consulting his Autonomous Self — reading the objective data given to him by his body. By doing so, he is able to spend less time and energy thinking about whether he should have another bite, or stay up a little longer, or skip the next workout. This allows him to eliminate problems like self-destructive behavior. 

Goal Alignment  

“Isn’t it weird that we commit the same self-destructive behaviors hundreds or even thousands of times in a lifetime? Even when we know they shorten our life, accelerate disease and aging, cloud our judgment and make us feel miserable.” – Bryan Johnson 

Bryan explains that our self-destructive behavior can arise from what he calls a Goal Alignment problem. To understand this problem, we must change how we think about our sense of self.  Johnson says we actually have many different selves, not just a single self. Therefore, the Goal Alignment problem arises when the goals of our many selves do not align, generating inner turmoil and habitual self-harm.

For him, “7 pm Bryan” ruined the life of the other Bryans by overeating at night, leading to bad sleep, depressed mood, weight gain, and accelerated aging. In other words, the goals of 7 pm Bryan did not align with, say, Healthy Bryan, or Optimum Bryan. Johnson says the solution to this Goal Alignment problem is to identify the destructive self (or selves) and stop letting that self (or selves) make decisions. This can be achieved by consulting the Autonomous Self. Johnson says: 

“Believe it or not, this is your most consequential and powerful life intervention.”

Anti-Aging Routine

Through Goal Alignment (eliminating conscious decision-making) via his Autonomous Self (monitoring his biological measurements), Johnson’s ultimate goal is to stop his own biological aging. He is attempting this by following over 200 science-backed protocols, which he updates with new and emerging scientific evidence. Upon waking, Bryan wears a red-light helmet for hair growth and heart-rate variability therapy. Then he has what he calls the Green Giant: 

• 8 oz of water
• Spermidine, 2 Tbsp chlorella powder, yielding 13.5mg spermidine
• Amino Complex 7.6 g
• Creatine 2.5 g
• Collagen Peptides 20 g
• Cocoa Flavanols 500 mg
• Ceylon Cinnamon 1 tsp

And his morning pills: 

• Acarbose 200mg 
• Ashwagandha 600mg
• B Complex .25 pill on M/Th
• BroccoMax 250mg
• C 500mg
• Ca-AKG 2 grams
• Cocoa Flavanols 500mg
• D-3 2,000 IU
• DHEA 25mg
• E 67mg
• EPA 500mg with vitamin E 5mg
• Garlic 2.4g equivalent
• Garlic 1.2g (kyolic)
• Ginger Root 2.2g
• Glucosamine Sulphate 2KCL 1,500mg
• Iodine as potassium iodide 125 mcg 
• Lithium, as lithium orotate, 1mg
• Lycopene 10mg
• Lysine 1g
• Metformin ER 1,500 (Rx)
• Nicotinamide Riboside 375mg (6 x wk)
• N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine (NAC) 1,800 mg
• Proferrin 10mg
• Turmeric with piperine 1g
• Taurine 1g
• Ubiquinol 100mg
• Zeaxanthin (20mg Lutein, 4mg Zeaxanthin)
• Zinc 15mg

Next, Johnson performs his 1-hour exercise routine, which consists of over 25 exercises. Once that’s done, he eats one of his three meals for the day while he does his skincare routine, designed to reverse the skin aging caused by sun damage. Overall, he eats a 1,977-calorie vegan diet (except for collagen peptides) consisting of 19% protein, 33% carbs, and 48% fat and is in a caloric deficit, fasting for 16 to 18 hours. 

With dinner, Johnson takes another set of pills, most of which are a second dose of his morning pills, listed here. These supplements include 375 mg of the NAD+ booster NR, but he recently announced that he would be switching to NMN for 90 days to see if it makes a difference. Finally, for sleep, Johnson has a dedicated temperature-controlled room with curtains that never open. He sleeps ten hours after his last meal of the day, so his heart rate (metabolism) is low. 

Going Beyond the Known 

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th-century German philosopher. 

Many supplements and dietary interventions that show promise in extending lifespan and slowing or reversing aging aren’t backed by solid clinical evidence — yet. Thus, based on current research, we may be able to predict which interventions will prove viable. Hence Johnson’s Blueprint program, which he spends $2 million per year on. This makes Johnson a walking experiment for the latest aging biology research, the concluding results of which we can only imagine. 

In Blueprint, Johnson describes what he calls Zeroth Principle thinking, which involves discovering concepts that we didn’t know existed but are fundamental truths underlying our reality (like the concept of zero). If uncovered, these concepts will allow us to think in ways that can change civilization as we know it. Johnson hopes to find such concepts through Blueprint, Kernel, and OS Fund. Or even better, he hopes that AI will elucidate many of these concepts for us.